Recently I was a speaker at Westcon’s Cloud event in Orlando, FL. While the event was being held close to Disney, Universal Studios, and other hot spots for fun and games, the event itself was all business as the audience of value-added resellers (VARs) were busy trying to figure out how to position cloud and […]

Software-defined storage, or SDS, seems such a great idea. After all, when we are faced by a new project most of us still think in terms of how many drives to buy for it, yet the fact is that we can never know what that project will need as it evolves, so we almost always […]

A couple of years ago I blogged about the rise of the Selfish App, an application that downloads a lot of data as fast as it can, regardless of the needs of other applications on the network. The reason this ancient history came to mind was a new study about the Application Economy. It’s nice […]

From Technology to Product Intel may be the Godzilla of computer processing technology, but all giants have humble beginnings, and if they do not keep in touch with their inspirational grassroots, they may wither and die. At this years’ Intel Developers Forum (IDF14), Intel recognized the inspirational importance of young, untethered, way-out-of-box talent as manifested […]

Oracle Open World 2014 kicks off next week and promises to be like no other as, I’m sure everyone is well aware, last week the company’s CEO, Larry Ellison, announced he was turning the reigns over to the duo of Mark Hurd and Safra Catz. Ellison also announced he wasn’t leaving the company; rather, he […]

Networks are facing serious problems with the four Vs — volume, velocity, variety and variability — so it should come as no surprise that any glimmer of a hope, i.e. software defined networking, is generating significant interest. While most of the interest in SDN is positive — new and existing vendors and a growing number […]

As noted recently, network hardware may be on the ropes, but while certainly battered and bruised, it still matters. In fact, more than $1 trillion will be spent on telecom and datacom equipment and software over the next 5 years, according to a new report from Infonetics Research. Last year, sales of telecom and datacom […]

It’s a good news/bad news situation for Cisco, according to a couple of new reports. The good news is that Cisco still dominates the networking industry, showing its heels to the more than 100 vendors competing for a slice of a $50-billion pie. On the bad news front — or at least problematic from Cisco’s […]

A couple of months ago I attended VCE’s first annual analyst conference. For those that don’t know VCE, it’s a joint venture — primarily between Cisco and EMC, with a bit of funding tossed in from VMWare to round out the offering. VCE acts as both a technical integrator and a professional services firm for […]

Author Mark Twain is said to have lamented the three types of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. Twain, who knew a thing or two about people, also said “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.“, and given the latest numbers on IT budgets, too many businesses are not paying attention to this formula […]